Email marketing

Segmenting your email marketing lists

Email marketing is more successful if it focuses on people you know are interested in what you're offering. Customers who have willingly signed up to your email marketing list are more likely to want to read your email messages. People are easily annoyed when they receive an email that is irrelevant to them and they are likely to delete marketing messages - or spam - from your business without reading them. They could also decide to unsubscribe from all your marketing email communications.

For example, if you're running a special offer on computer hardware, it will be more effective if you promote it only to people responsible for buying IT.

Segmenting your email marketing list

Once you have built up a database with customer details, preferences and interests you can then segment your email marketing list to targeted groups of customers. Segment your customers based on the target markets in your marketing strategy. This makes your messaging more relevant and can increase open and click rates which in turn can lead to increased sales.

Some characteristics you can use to segment your lists include:

age

gender

geographic location

previous buying behaviour

interests

job title

job function

industry they work in

For example, you could segment your email marketing list on postcodes or areas of interest if you are promoting an event in a particular area. You could also segment your contacts into ‘persona’ groups based on their demographics and send targeted messages about products that may be of particular interest.

However, to process the data in this way you must ensure that you comply with the Data Protection Act 2018 and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), namely that you have a lawful basis for processing the data in this way and have complied with all other data protection compliance requirements.

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